On January 14, 2009, this court filed a memorandum opinion and order denying the defendants' motion to dismiss the claims of the plaintiffs from Taiwan on grounds of forum non conveniens. In re Factor VIII or IX Concentrate Blood Prods. Liab. Litig., 595 F. Supp. 2d 855 (N.D. Ill. 2009). The reason for the denial was that the threshold issue of whether the claims are barred by limitations can more economically be resolved by the district courts in California than by requiring the parties to resort to the courts of Taiwan.

Thereafter, the defendants requested this court to decide the limitations issue, and plaintiffs had no objection to our doing so.

We agreed to take on the defendants' motion, and the parties have filed additional briefs, supplementing the arguments they made on the forum non conveniens motion. We will refer to the January 14, 2009 slip opinion as the "Chang opinion."

One of the issues we had to address in order to decide the forum non conveniens motion was whether Taiwan is an "adequate" forum for the litigation of plaintiffs' claims. The plaintiffs argued that it was not adequate because their claims were time-barred in Taiwan. We agreed that if the claims were time-barred there, this would make Taiwan an inadequate forum. Chang at 12.*fn1 The defendants argued that even if this were true it would not entitle the plaintiffs to litigate their claims in the California district courts, because the limitations law there would be no different. This was because, in defendants' view, the California courts would apply Taiwanese limitations law, and, even if they were to apply California limitations law, that would include California's "borrowing statute" which, again, would result in the claims being time-barred. Plaintiffs, of course, disagreed with these arguments and contended that under the law of California their claims are not time-barred.

We give this background to explain why it was necessary for us, in deciding the forum non conveniens motion, to delve into the limitations law of California. In doing that, however, we did not purport to make any final decision as to whether plaintiffs' claims are in fact time-barred and specifically pointed out that we were only giving our "best judgment as to what might be the outcome concerning limitations" as a part of the necessary forum non conveniens analysis. Chang at 19 n.7.

We have approached this new motion of the defendants for summary judgment on limitations grounds with a determination to take a fresh look at the law and not merely rely on the analysis we made in Chang. Plaintiffs have made some new arguments -- one in regard to the borrowing statute in particular -- and we have fully considered them.

For convenience, we will sometimes adopt relevant portions of the Chang opinion in order to avoid repetition of case citations and quotations from authorities.

WHICH LIMITATIONS LAW APPLIES

The federal courts in California will apply California's "governmental interest test" to determine which limitations law applies to these diversity actions. Orr v. Bank of America, 285 F.3d 764, 772 n.4 (9th Cir. 2002). The governmental interest test was explained in American Bank of Commerce v. Corondoni, 169 Cal. App. 3d 368, 372-73 (Cal. Ct. App. 1985), and the explanation is quoted in Chang at 13. We concluded in Chang that California has a lesser interest in what limitations period applies to plaintiffs' claims than does Taiwan, so that, under the governmental interest test, the California courts would apply the limitations law of Taiwan to plaintiffs' claims. Chang at 14. The parties have argued this question anew, but we are still persuaded that Taiwan has the greater interest. Accordingly, we now hold that the limitations law of Taiwan applies to plaintiffs' claims. The courts of Taiwan have dismissed substantially identical claims as time-barred in the Peng litigation, Chang at 14-15, and plaintiffs do not argue that their claims are viable in Taiwan. Accordingly, applying Taiwanese limitations law, we hold plaintiffs' tort claims are barred by limitations.

We recognize that there is an argument on the other side of the governmental interest question, and, to cover the possibility that we are wrong in saying Taiwan has the greater interest, we will also address the question of whether plaintiffs' claims would be barred if California limitations law were applied. This leads us to the question of whether there is any material difference between the limitations law of Taiwan and that of California. If the statutory time limits of California were to be applied, the claims are barred. Plaintiffs argue, however, that unlike Taiwan, California has a "discovery" rule that tolls the beginning of the limitations period until such time as the plaintiffs acquire or reasonably should have acquired knowledge of the defendants' wrongdoing and the connection between that wrongdoing and plaintiffs' injuries. Plaintiffs argue that due to fraud and concealment by the defendants, they did not learn the necessary information until May 22, 2003, when an article appeared in the New York Times. (Pls.' Mem. in Opp'n at 17.) These suits were filed in California in 2004, a year later, and therefore plaintiffs believe they are timely by virtue of the California discovery rule.

The New York Times article stated that the defendant Bayer continued to sell non-heat-treated concentrate in foreign countries, including Taiwan, after it knew that its newly-introduced heat-treated product was safer and unlikely to transmit the HIV virus. We will assume, for purposes of this discussion of the discovery rule, that plaintiffs did not know of this allegation until it appeared in the New York Times article. The question is whether plaintiffs' ignorance of Bayer's export of factor concentrate that had been discontinued in the United States for safety reasons, and Bayer's alleged concealment of the different way it treated United States and foreign markets, tolled the statute of limitations until the time the New York Times article appeared. We hold that it did not. More than five years prior to the appearance of the article, plaintiffs, through their counsel, had begun negotiations with Bayer and Baxter to settle their negligence claims. Clearly, the plaintiffs suspected that their infections had been caused by infusion of the defendants' factor concentrates and that the defendants ...

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